Student Activity Samples
1) Experience of Slavery Wrap Up Activity
Objective:
Students can determine historical significance by evaluating details about the experience of slavery and negotiate/collaborate with classmates to create a combined overview and individual list of most significant experiences.
Procedures:
As a wrap up to the research that students conduct on the experience of formerly enslaved persons, each student pair/triad will create a poster that outlines details about the experience of enslaved persons. Posters should contain both text and visual components that outline the experience of their assigned ex-slave. Typically I would require three to five detailed bullet points with at least three relevant illustrations, but individual teachers could adjust as necessary. These posters will then be displayed on the classroom wall to allow for easy access.
Once all posters are completed, students will be given three colored dots and asked to vote on the most significant responses by placing their dots onto the posters. This is designed to foster thinking about significance and provide a practice opportunity for students to decide what is important and why? After students have had time to circulate and vote the votes should be tabulated, displayed, and discussed. I usually use the document camera or create a Google Slide to type onto and display. At this point the class should create a top ten list, though depending on the posters and class engagement one could adjust that number.
Now that students have collaborated on the class list, they should be asked to refine the list on their own to once again practice historical significance thinking. Have the students (using the class list) select their personal top three, and write a short paragraph explaining why they made those choices. This last part of the activity could be done in class, or could be started in class and finished up as a homework assignment.
The narratives that I use for this assignment are chosen to give a variety of experience for the students to read about. Although I use narratives from Ohio and Kansas, the formerly enslaved persons chosen are from a variety of other states. Some of the narratives are very short and some several pages long with more detail. Remember that these are organized on the website by state, and the specific files that I chose from are: Arkansas (vol 2, part 6), Georgia (vol 4, part 4), Ohio (vol 12 – Charles Anderson, Sarah Woods Burke, Susan Bledsoe), Kansas (vol 6 – Clayton Holbert, Bill Simms, and Belle Williams), and Florida (vol 3 – Josephine Anderson, Mary Biddie, Rivana Boynton, and Matilda Brooks).
2) Effects of the Race of Interviewers
Objective:
Students can make and support a claim, using evidence, about specific differences in sample narratives based upon the race of the interviewer.
Procedures:
In order to better understand what effects the race of the interviewer had on the stories told by the formerly enslaved persons, students will work with a partner to compare and contrast two different narratives and then create a short writing response in which they make a claim about the effects and support that claim with evidence from one or both of those interviews.
On the Library of Congress website there is an appendix that is supplied by Yetman that lists the race of several of the WPA writers. For my classroom I have selected one set of interviews from Arkansas and one from Georgia, with each set containing a narrative produced by a black interviewer and a narrative produced by a white interviewer. From Arkansas I chose black interviewer Sam S. Taylor’s interviews of James Reeves and Sallie Crane and white interviewer Irene Robertson’s interviews of Milton Ritchie and Ida Ridgeley. Longer interviews will be excerpted but not changed. From Georgia I chose black interviewer Edwin Driskell’s interview of William Ward and white interviewer Grace McCune’s interview of Cordelia Thomas.
Students will be again groups in pairs, with some triads if necessary. I should perhaps mention that throughout the unit (and indeed my whole school year) students are mixed and matched with different partners in order to get a variety of experiences working with different classmates. Each pair will be given a set of two narratives and will be asked to work together to identify the specifics of the experiences reported, creating a list on a T-chart or some other organizer that separates the notes about the black interviewer and the white interviewer.
Once students have the list I would ask them to report out on any patterns. Some possible questions to consider at this point would be: 1) which narratives contain more details overall? 2) Are there events in the narratives produced by the black interviewers that are not seen in the other, and vice versa? 3) What specific differences can be observed - are there some details in one not found in the other such as diet, working conditions, treatment of families, descriptions of punishments, etc.? 4) Which narratives ‘ring truer’ in the opinion of the students, and why?
Once students have had time to research, reflect, and discuss I would then supply a writing prompt and ask them to consider and respond about which type of interviewer produced the most accurate, relevant, and useful narrative for studying the experience of enslaved persons. It is important to communicate to students that there is no one ‘right’ answer that they are expected to produce. They must work to make their own claim about importance and relevance and are tasked with using evidence/example from the narratives as support. In this way they again practice and refine their historical thinking skills.
In this activity I would have students doing the research together in class and would discuss the questions above as a whole group. I would ask my students to begin the writing in class so I could support them and they would finish as homework. There are certainly other ways to meet the objective that teachers at other levels or with different student populations could utilize.
Teachers wanting to use this activity can find Yetman’s list about race in the ‘Articles and Essay’s page of this collection, and the specific narratives that I used came from Arkansas (vol 2, part 6) and Georgia (vol 4, part 4). The narrative are fairly easily accessible by state on the Library of Congress website.
3) Thinking About the Questions
Objective:
Students can match segments of narratives to a series of questions provided and explain why they made those matches.
Procedures:
One of the assignments earlier in the unit is for the students to interview a family member about a recent event and then have those answers compared in class. We will create a list of five questions together in class and the students will ask only three. Because of the variation in questions chosen and because of individual memory there should be some variety in the responses that students bring back, demonstrating that interviews are often affected by the questions. This activity would be a follow up to link the student interview assignment to the study of the narratives.
In order to prepare teachers should access the Administrative Files (see below for hints about how to access) and on page xx see a list of questions that were supplied from the national office. One cannot assume that all questions were asked in all interviews, but this list of questions gives a starting point to discuss what type of questions were typically asked. There are twenty questions, some multipart questions, listed on page xx and xxi, and another ten can be found on page xxxii. Teachers should select some or all of these questions and then print them out onto orange or other brightly colored index cards or other small pieces of card stock. The questions should be numbered to facilitate the matching process.
How many questions used would depend upon grade level and time available, for this activity I would select 12 specific questions so that there were three sets circulating in the classroom for my sized classes. In this way students that are struggling to match can see what other students have done and decide if they agree or not, providing them with a starting point for their own thinking.
Teachers should then select excerpts from narratives that could reasonably be matched with the sample questions chosen. For my classroom I would chose a mixture of excerpts from narratives that students have worked with before and combine these with some new material. The excerpts would be printed out large enough to be easily read from a short distance and displayed on the walls of the classroom. The excerpts should have an easily seen alpha designation, again to facilitate matching.
Students would then take their question cards, perhaps three for each student, and be given time to circulate around the room selecting their matches. I would supply a very simple graphic organizer for this task, a space to record the letter of the expert side by side with the number of the questions that are holding. While not specifically a partner activity there is no reason that students cannot or should not work on this assignment cooperatively, assisting each other as needed or desired. I would also be circulating the room at this point assisting where necessary. This matching process is certainly customizable to grade level and teacher preference.
On the day of this activity I would take two questions (not used in the class set) and four short excerpts and model the process for the students. I would pass out the list of questions for the students to have in front of them and then display an excerpt on the screen. For the first excerpt I would talk them through the process and think aloud about how I arrived at my match. I would then display another excerpt and give the students two to three minutes with their elbow partner to discuss and decide, asking students to then share their decisions and thinking as well. This will provide students with a method for working on their own, but again this prep exercise is customizable depending upon specific teacher needs.
Once students have had time to work with the questions and excerpts and have made their matches, I would ask them to reflect on why. What specific words or phrases led them to make their specific matches? Are there patterns that emerge? What can be learned from these patterns – were some questions used more than others? What effects would this variation have had on the output of the interviews? This discussion primes the students for the final part of the assignment.
Students in my classes would then be asked to write about the activity. Why did they make their own matches and what evidence of their thinking (examples from the excerpts) can they select to explain their thinking. Again, the goal is not correct or incorrect answers, the goal is to develop thinking skills and use reasoning and evidence to explain and support that thinking.
Specific to the 20-21 school year, this matching assignment could also be done using Google Slides or some other technology, moving the activity from the physical classroom to the online classroom as necessary. As long as there are two distinct sets of information (questions and interview segments), the process is modeled or introduced somehow, and the students have the opportunity to discuss together and then reflect on their thinking, the activity should work.
The Administrative Files can be found on the About this Collection page of the greater set of webpages, and while unable to share a specific link that may not be permanent, I can share one possible search tree: [Library of Congress, Digital Collections, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938, About this Collection].
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